Waking Nightmare
by paganpunk2
Summary: River discovers Jayne's personal demon, and determines to end his silence about it. Only Rayne if you squint.


He'd never seen her this big before.

It was kind of scary the way she ballooned out up front, like she was carrying a watermelon in her skirt. Going about getting his dinner, she'd had to stop and steady herself for a second, turning red from holding her breath half out of fear and half out of pain, trying not to let it show on her face. She didn't want to scare him, and she knew how much he hated seeing her in pain. He might only have been six years old, but her boy was awful sensitive about some things. He just plain couldn't stand to see her hurt.

So she waited just outside of the dining room for the contraction to pass before she stepped into his view. Spotting the plate in her hand he started to bounce up and down in his chair, excited, hungry after a long day of school and chores with nothin' to break up the time between the morning's oatmeal and the approaching food except a small open-faced sandwich at noon. Smiling, she set it down before him.

"Hold it!" she ordered sharply when he reached eagerly for his spoon. "What're you forgettin' about?"

The boy in front of her looked bashful for the briefest of moments, then quickly slapped his hands together in front of him. "ThankyaGodforthefoodweeat, thankyaGodfortheworldsosweet," he blurted out as quickly as he could, staring up at her from underneath his eyelashes to see if she would accept that.

"And?" she prompted, raising an eyebrow.

"an'Jesusnameweprayamen!" he added, his voice strained in anticipation. Even after the last word, he remained frozen in his seat, waiting for her nod of approval and knowing all too well the switch that awaited if he jumped the gun.

"Well, son, I reckon the Lord can understand gibberish well enough for that to do," she allowed. "Go ahead, now."

Without another word he set himself to shoveling in mouthful after mouthful, slowing down only when she occasionally reminded him to mind his manners better. _Amazin' that boy ain't choked to death on his own dinner before now, way he eats,_ she thought as she sat across from him and watched.

"Ain't you gonna have nothin', mama?" he asked when his plate was clean.

"I'll wait for your pa," she replied, her voice terse. _Curse that man, anyway. Probably off drinkin' his pay again. Can't be bothered to come home and have supper with his own child, never mind savin' a dime to help feed him, poor thing. And now another one on the way. Almost seems like it'd be more of a blessin' for this one to go the way the last two did._ Her lips tightened at that last thought. She wanted this baby. She'd wanted all of her children, and yet out of five pregnancies and four births the only little one she'd been able to keep alive was the boy across from her. He stared at her now, his bright blue eyes wide and worried.

"When's the baby comin', mama?"

"I don't know, son. Soon enough."

"'sit gonna be a boy or a girl?"

"I done told ya I don't know any more about that than you," she chastised gently, standing up to take his plate back to the kitchen. "Only God knows right now, you know that. I done told you how babies come about, you know you've got to wait just like the rest of us."

He pouted for a minute. "What're ya gonna call it?" he asked, trailing after her and standing at her elbow as she washed his dishes.

"Reckon I'll know when I see him'r her," she answered. "Knew what to call you just as soon as I saw you, so I suppose it'll be the same with this one." A gentle smile captured, for a moment, the beautiful girl she'd been not so many years earlier, some time before the freezing night when she'd come full term with the child beside her. She could still see the frost on the inside of the window, hear her own agonized panting as she performed womankind's most instinctual act with only the wind whistling high and loud on the other side of the wall for company. _Almost high enough to drown out them lusty little first cries. Almost, but not quite. Stubborn one from the start, you was. You keep that trait, son; you're goin' to need it._

"Mama," he started again, breaking through her brief reverie, "what-"

An unsteady pounding on the back door silenced the boy. He shrank against her, clutching her skirts as a drunken male voice shouted for entrance. "Em'ly? Woman, you got this here door locked. Let me in m'house, gorramit!" Then the pounding resumed, growing angrier as each second passed without a response.

She bent down as best as she could, worry lines marking her still-young face as she held her only child by his shoulders. "Now you listen to me," she commanded quietly. "You go on upstairs now and git in bed like a good boy. Anybody comes in to see ya, you just pretend to be fast asleep, all right? Dead to the world. No matter what you hear, I don't want you stirrin' south of them stairs til the sun's rising again."

The barely-masked terror on her face shook the boy to the core. He knew better than to argue, but he desperately wanted to. _How'm I supposed to keep him from hurtin' you if I'm __upstairs?_ he wanted to ask. _I don't want him to hurt you, mama. I know he's my pa and I'm s'posed to love him, but I hate him. I hate him when he hurts you. _He wanted to stay, but his feet dragged him to the stairs, driven by the ruckus at the door. With one last glance back down at his mother's pale visage, he skipped up out of sight. _Reckon I'll lay down,_ he told himself, _but I'll listen real careful so's she don't get hurt again._ Maybe, just maybe, tonight would be different. If he listened hard enough, surely he could keep away the bad things. So long as he paid attention, she'd be safe, and the little brother or sister she was carrying – _gosh I hope it's a boy, be fun to have somebody to play with_ – would be too.

"That's it, baby, you get up them steps and stay there," Emily Cobb whispered as her child vanished overhead. Wiping a hand over her brow and praying that her son would ignore anything he heard tonight, she went to open the door that her husband was still shaking with his fist.

"Woman, I swear if'n you don't open this here door, I'll-"

"Shh!" she ordered as she released the lock and pushed the heavy barrier wide, moving aside to let the drunken man in. "Please, Thomas, the boy's sleepin'. Ain't no need ta wake him up, now." She was not a docile woman by nature, but experience and a strong sense of self-preservation had taught her that acting subservient was the safest route to take when the man she'd sworn to stand by until her dying day was drunk off of his already wobbly rocker. "You hungry?" she went on, stepping back as he turned in a full circle, glaring around the kitchen. "I saved ya some-"

"Where's Jayne?" he growled, eyes suddenly predatory.

"I done told ya, he's sleepin'. Don't you want-"

"He done his work? School an'...all a that?"

_That boy does more work around here than you do,_ she wanted to sneer back at him. "Course. Came straight home and did his school work, then went right out and finished up the chores. Just like always. Got the high grade in spellin' again this week," she added, hoping that the accolade would be enough to turn the conversation away from the child upstairs. _Knowin' him, he's listening to every word. _

"He'd better a done." He stomped a few feet away, snarled at his disheveled reflection in the window, and turned back to her. "I wanna see 'im."

"Thomas, he's asleep. Can't you see him tomorrow?" A knot of dread wound up in her stomach as she noticed the blood rushing into his ears and neck, turning them an ugly reddish-purple. _He starts swingin' at me, no telling what I might do. So close to dropping this __baby right out already, last thing I need is him pounding on me._ She wrapped her arms around her swollen stomach without thinking about it.

"Whyn't you keep him up long enough to see me?" Thomas demanded, drawing up in front of her and bowing his head to stare down menacingly. "You tryin' to turn my own son against me now, Em'ly? S'that how's it is?"

"No, never," she negated, trying to move away and succeeding only in backing into the counter. "Just didn't know when you'd be home. Wanted to be sure he'd get plenty of sleep for school tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's Saturday," the man hovering over her revealed slyly. "Ain't no school."

_Oh, lordamercy. _She'd forgotten it was Friday night; her husband came home drunk so often lately that whiskey on his breath was no longer a hallmark of the weekend. "I-well, I just-" She stumbled to find a response that he would accept, and was only half surprised when his work-hardened palm smacked across her face.

"_Bu cheng shi dang fu__1__,"_ he accused, grabbing her by the throat and pulling her so close that she could hardly breathe through the alcoholic aura he carried. "I oughta pound that brat you're carrying right out of you."

"Thomas," she tried to beg through swiftly swelling lips, stopping when she saw that doing so would only make things worse. _Just let it be quick, so's he don't have a chance to come back down. He don't need to see none of this._ Seeing a coarse hand descending once more, she gritted her teeth and tried not to scream.

Lying very, very still in bed, he listened. Every word floated up the stairs and through the open doorway to his ears, and as it went on his alarm increased.

"I wanna see 'im," he heard his father demand, and he was at the door before he realized it. _If I go down an' see him, maybe he'll get nicer, _he thought hopefully, creeping towards the stairs. At the top he hesitated, his mother's admonition ringing in his head. _Mama said to stay in bed, though. He might get madder if I don't listen and do what she said. _Indecision tore at his child's heart; he might be able to stop the fight before it really started, but his presence below might also just make it more violent. Worse, he would be disobeying his mother, and she always got that sad look he hated whenever he didn't listen to her. Her disappointed eyes haunting him, he sat down by the railing and continued to listen.

"_Bu cheng shi dang fu!"_

His eyes flew open wide. _Mama ain't gonna like him cursin'. Those were bad words, __like the ones teacher had ta swat Danny Archer for last week. He shouldn't be calling her things like that, she ain't like them ladies what live in town and don't wear hardly any clothes or nothin'._

The sound of something collapsing, followed by a low cry of pain, made him jump. _Mama! _He got to his feet, determined to do...something...but he froze, gripping the banister so tightly that splinters dug into his fingers. A steady stream of cruel misnomers fled from his father's mouth, punctuated only by the sound of fists hitting undefended flesh. It was the latter which finally spurred him back into action, propelling him down the stairs.

So sudden and naturally graceful was the boy's descent that Thomas, standing over his huddled and sobbing wife, didn't hear him coming. Caught completely by surprise when something live and clearly angry landed on his back, he cried out in shock, and was immediately ashamed of himself for showing weakness of any sort. After a few seconds of battle during which the _xiaoyao__2_ left a series of deep scratches down his neck, the adult Cobb managed to fling his pest off, tossing him to the floor. "What'n the hell d'you think you're doing?" he shouted down at the child. "Well?" he demanded when there was no answer.

Wiping a trickle of blood away from his nose, the boy glowered. "Quit hurtin' her!" he shouted back, the strength in his voice taking all three of them aback.

After a stunned silence, Thomas threw his head back and began to laugh, nearly doubling over with mirth at his son's rebellion. The noise unsettled the boy, and he glanced over at the woman for guidance. _What's he laughin' for? He musta gone crazy or something, ain't nothing funny. Mama's bleeding, what's he laughing for?_

"Jayne, baby, come here," she mumbled, gesturing to him frantically with one hand while the other clutched at her stomach. He started toward her, intent to defend her clear in his eyes, but just before she could clasp him to herself and try to guard him from the firestorm she knew was coming the laughter ceased. _Whyn't you stay upstairs like I told ya, son?_ The thought flashed across her face, and from the boy's look just before he was swept out of her field of vision she knew he had sensed her fear.

Thomas Cobb's line of work called for clothing that could protect a man from the kinds of things he was likely to encounter inside a mine shaft. The most important thing he owned, short of the helmet he kept at work, were the well-worn and oft-tested boots he slipped his feet into almost every morning. The steel that curved up over the wearer's toes was intended to keep the foot from being crushed; Thomas was well aware, however, that with the proper application of force that same steel could be used to crush something else. Swinging his leg back as his moment of alcoholic humor dissipated, he turned his boot toward his dissident offspring. _Woman's carrying another, anyway. Might as well teach this'un a lesson about how it works when you piss off a man who's bigger'n you are._

The boy saw his mother's face change as he crawled towards her. Disappointment sped across her features, and tears instantly appeared in his eyes. _Didn't mean to make ya sad, mama. I just wanted him to stop hurting you._ As the laughter overhead vanished, he opened his mouth to say her name. Before he could so much as utter a syllable, though, something foreign connected with his ribs, tossing him across the room as if he weighed nothing at all. His head smashed into the wall, plaster and paint dust clogging his nose and burning his eyes in the few seconds before the whole world swam away.

Somewhere, far off, his mother was screaming his name.

He sat bolt upright in the bed, hand smacking audibly over his mouth to contain a cry of pain. His eyes danced around the dark room, awareness of reality slowly returning as his fingers searched out the gun beneath his sweat-soaked pillow. _Serenity,_ the thought flickered through his mind. _Serenity. Safe. _ A pause as his muscles relaxed, his shoulders sagging in relief. "_Ta ma de,_" he muttered. "Gorram _meng yan__3__."_

"Your dreams are too vivid," a feminine voice announced quietly from the opposite corner of the room. Releasing a string of curses, he ripped the gun out from it's spot on the bed and brought it around to bear, finger tight on the trigger until he realized that it was only the girl.

"What in the name of every ruttin' god I ever heard of are you doin' in here?" he demanded with less anger than he would have preferred.

"The girl can go where she wishes."

Running a hand over his forehead, he swore again. "Cause that ain't the scariest thing I ever heard or nothing."

"I did not want to come here."

"Then why're you sittin' over there?" he asked suspiciously. _Probably got about nine hundred ways to kill a man while he's sleepin' dancing through that cracked brain of hers._

"Three hundred and ninety four would be feasible in this room alone." When he jumped warily, she grinned. "Nightmare fodder," she singsonged.

"Better'n the one I just had," he muttered under his breath. _Then again, Reaver __dreams are better'n that, so..._

"Not a dream," she interrupted, her mien serious again.

"Will you get out a here before Mal puts me in the air lock and throws away the key?"

"Not a dream," she repeated. "A memory. How Jayne became Jayne."

In the midst of reaching for pants so he could at least be semi-clothed if the hatch door were to be suddenly kicked in by one very perturbed captain, he stopped. "What're you talkin' about, Crazy?" he ordered quietly.

"You." Standing, she moved to the bed and sat down beside him. Her uncanny gaze bit into his eyes, making his head hurt. "I don't make your head hurt," she corrected him. "He does." For the briefest of moments her hand rested on his hair, pressing softly against the section of his skull that had smacked into the wall on that night so many years ago. "Same person, different life lived," she whispered.

"Huh?" Pulling away, he watched her from the corners of his eyes. "That don't make no sense, girl."

"You're still Jayne," she explained.

"Really, now?" he deadpanned back. "Wouldn't a guessed."

"Protector," she labeled him. "Stealthy. Wary. Mama's boy." He frowned at that one, and she giggled. "Crafty in a funny way. Forgetful of manners."

"Would you get going?" Her list was starting to freak him out.

"Smart."

"Now I know you're out a your head. Ain't nobody in their right mind'd call me smart."

"Not since you were six," she agreed with a nod.

He stared at her in the dark. "What the hell are you trying to do to me, girl? Ain't supposed to be in my head, anyway."

"Didn't want to be." Her eyes were damp now, on the verge of overflowing. "The screaming was too loud, I had to come..."

"Don't you go having one of them episodes of yours down here. Be in trouble enough if someone sees you with me like this," he said worriedly, swallowing heavily. _She pitches a fit down here and I'm screwed._

"Why don't you say anything?" she asked tearfully.

"What?"

"Why don't you say anything when he calls you names?"

He shook his head. "What...you mean your brother?"

"Yes. When he calls you a man-ape, and when the others go along with it. When they call you stupid without saying it in so many words. You never object." She hitched herself closer across the mattress, peering up at him. "Why not?"

He licked his lips nervously. "Cause that's what I am, girlie. Always have been. Always will be."

"No!" She shoved him without warning, her anger palpable. "You weren't!"

"I was too," he objected. "Can't help how a person's born, same as you can't help that you came out all genius-y."

"You weren't born dumb, Jayne Cobb," she informed him, a glimmer of threat in her tone.

He looked down at the floor, invisible in the blackness but solid beneath his feet. "I know that," he whispered. "But I might as well a been. Six year old takes a knock like that on the head, they're lucky to be alive and functional. Still bein' smart...that woulda been asking for too much."

"Not stupid," she insisted.

"Listen, crazy, I reckon I know what I am. You ain't got no right-"

"Smart in a different way," she stopped him, placing her finger on his lips to shut him up. "Your cognitive abilities are perfectly functional, they merely follow an alternate pathway because of the injury you suffered as a child. Consequently they sometimes reach a different conclusion than is reached by those with statistically normal neurological processes." She paused, noting the fact that he did not ask her to explain what she had just said. "You had the potential to perform any number of life tasks," she reminded him.

"Mebbe. But not anymore. Not after that night." _Why am I even talking about this? I ought to be asleep, not yammering with Crazy. Even if the conversation is creepifyingly normal-like. _"Why do you care, anyway?"

"You don't hate him."

"Hate who?"

"Simon."

He sighed wearily. "No. I don't. I just ain't a fan of the way he treats me sometimes."

"You were the first to be rude," she recalled.

"That was a joke. He just didn't get it."

She pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. "I wish you would tell him," she breathed.

He frowned. "Mean about the joke?"

"No. About your midnight REM cogitation."

Several blinks passed before he realized that she wanted him to talk to Simon about his nightmare. "Like hell," he sniffed.

"He would understand."

"Like...hell," he repeated more forcefully.

"He has made neurology his specialty of late. He would understand."

"You can be goin' right about now. I ain't telling him or nobody else about that, never. Ain't nobody's business. Only talked to you on account of you wouldn't shut up about it."

Her eyes grew wide like she was going to cry again, and he regretted his tone. _Looks almost like ma when she gets like that. Hate seeing women cry. Got to be the most unnervin' thing in the Verse._ Before he worked up the nerve to say anything else, though, she rose and went to his ladder, preparing to exit. Just before she ascended, she turned and met his eyes.

"Jayne?" she asked his name softly.

"What is it?"

"I'm sorry." A moment. "You did not deserve the father you had." Then, leaving him sitting in shock on his bed, she disappeared into the hallway, closing the hatch almost silently behind her.

He was still for many long minutes after she left, breathing heavily. _She just had to go and apologize, didn't she? _No one had ever apologized before for what had happened that night; his father hadn't given a damn that he'd nearly killed his son, and his mother had gone into labor and delivered Mattie right there on the dining room floor out of pure shock. Later, when she had two boys to feed and no husband to help her do so, she had forsworn ever mentioning that awful night again_, _and consequently the memory had been purged from the house. _Still in my head, though,_ Jayne lamented. _Can't get free from it, no matter how far I run. Don't take a person but five minutes to realize that I'm-_ He stopped, suddenly understanding why River had felt compelled to come down when she'd felt his dream. _Broken. Both cracked in the head. Aw, gorram it..._ Frustrated by this discovery, and far from certain what it ought to signify, he threw himself back on the bed.

"I only know one thing, Crazy," he spoke aloud. "And that's that tellin' them what happened to you ain't got you nothing but pity. I don't want that. I ain't telling nobody nothing." His proclamation stated, he rolled over, fully intending to go back to sleep.

In the dark, though, her voice, carrying a certainty well beyond her years, taunted him. "You're wrong, Jayne," it whispered at the back of his mind. "You're wrong."

Wanting to believe her, wanting so badly to feel the sense of acceptance he knew the girl had found by letting them know the reasons behind her being, a single tear slipped down his cheek. He let it rest for a moment, and then flung it away. _Ain't gonna be no cryin'. Not over me. I ain't worth it._

Elsewhere in the ship, River sighed in exasperation. _If he does not take care of this issue himself, the girl may be forced to act,_ she promised herself. _The comedy of errors must end some time._

1Lying whore

2Little demon

3nightmare


End file.
